Series:

Gateway Essentials

3 total works

Cover of Ambient

Ambient

by Jack Womack

Published 14 April 1988

You need to be rich to survive at all. But it's easier to be dead than poor.

Twenty-first-century New York. It's a nightmare. Reaganomics has gone mad. There's murder and mutilation on the bombed-out streets and in the corporate conference rooms. Manhattan is a zoo. There's guerrilla war on Long Island.

Seamus O'Malley is a bodyguard and assassin in the outrageously powerful Dryco organisation, and he's in deep trouble. Taking the job sounded like a good idea at the time. Falling in love with his employer's mistress, Avalon, probably wasn't so bright. Getting caught up in the Dryden family's crazy rivalries didn't help. Agreeing to murder the Old Man was plain stupid. And getting involved with the Ambients could only complicate matters further.

Before long, O'Malley's on the run, and there's nowhere safe to hide.

Cover of Terraplane

Terraplane

by Jack Womack

Published 1 October 1988
Terraplane, the second in Jack Womack's acclaimed Ambient series, is a vision of alternate reality -- New York in 1939, as experienced by travelers from the twenty-first century. Retired general-turned-corporate-spy Luther Biggerstaff and his hit man Jake are on a covert mission to kidnap Soviet superscientist Alekhine for their boss, the head of the multinational corporation Dryco. But Alekhine has disappeared, and they must be content with his genius assistant Oktobriana and a device he left behind -- which catapults them headlong into the past. But this 1939 is different -- slavery was not abolished until 1907, F.D.R. has been assassinated, and the Great Depression has cut even deeper; Churchill has died in a street accident, and the world is at Hitler's mercy. The only hope Luther and Jake have of getting home again depends on an unlikely conjunction of the New York World's Fair, the blues tunes of Robert Johnson, and the avant-garde physics of Nikola Tesla. Terraplane is a surreal, darkly comic, and gripping journey into the twilight zone of history gone mad.

Cover of Let's Put the Future behind Us

Murder, mafia and the scramble for money in the new Russia. A brilliantly received satire - achingly funny, deeply disturbing.

`We can prove Kennedy shot himself - as long as we're paid in advance.'... In the unfettered freedom of Russia's new-found venture-capital frenzy, Max Borodin can organize anything - if the readies are ready. That's why he's Moscow's most successful businessman. But Max's life has its downside: his wife, Tanya, nags him, his mistress, Sonya, exhausts him; and his brother Evgeny is a master at business fiascos. Then there are always the country's friendly mafia, keen to lend a helping hand with the profits of Max's Universal Manufacturing Company - producer of documents, historical and otherwise, to suit every conceivable occasion.

Let's Put the Future Behind Us is the wittiest job of fictional surgery on New Russia since its iron curtain was amputated.